In a collaboration between sculptors Beth Cavener Stitcher and Alessandro Gallo, the exquisite balance of the predator/prey cycle is explored in the work Tangled Up In You. The fluid grace of the intertwined hare and snake, with their anthropomorphic eyes, is offset with the physicality and tension between them. Cavener Stitcher's work looks in depth at not only this sensuous violence, but the balance between humanity and the innate animal instinct within all of us. Nastia Voynovskaya described the work up as 'visceral', and I think it's the only word which could possibly sum up all of the feelings and emotions this piece provokes.
I've always struggled with the moral and ideological arguments for eating meat and animal products; my father consoled me as a child that the native Americans said a prayer of thanks for the animal they killed and used all parts of it (I suspect this is a massive over-generalisation of the different spiritualties practiced by varied tribes, but I love him all the same for trying to comfort me), and it's only now that I've accepted that as a viable option and come to terms with it.
Whilst I do support the vegan/vegetarian movement at large in its efforts to bring the treatment of animals to our attention (though organised veganism can be hellish and hypocritical in practice) I no longer feel that it is the way to go. The production and importation of meat substitutes isn't always better for the environment than locally produced meat, and veganism is intrinsically at odds with the natural cycle of birth and death, which I feel the interplay of sexuality and brutality in Cavener and Gallo's sculpture represents; things must die for others to survive, and that's going to happen whether there's chicken in my salad or not.
You can see more of Cavener Stitcher's work on her website here (I personally favour "The Adoration (from Van Eyck)"), and more photos of the production of this sculpture on High Fructose. If you're in Milwaukee, you can see Tangled Up in You on show in the Milwaukee Museum of Art.
Fee
All images in this post were sourced from High Fructose. I do not own the rights to any of the above images.
